Obviously, the world is watching covid-19 transmission very carefully. Elected officials and the press are discussing what "the models" predict. As far as I can tell, they are talking about the SIR model: (Susceptible, Infected, Recovered). However, I can't tell if they are using a spatial model and if the spatial model they are using is point pattern or areal.This is critical because the disease has very obvious spatial autocorrelation and clustering in dense urban areas. However, there appears to be a road network effect and a social network effect. For example, are they using a Bayesian maximum entropy SIR? Or a Conditional Autoregressive Bayesian spatio-temporal model? An agent based model? Random walk?

I mean "they" generally. I'm sure different scholars are using different models, but right now I think I can find one spatio-temporal model, and what these scholars meant is that they did two cross sectional count data models (not spatial ones either) in two different time periods.